Research Statement

The Architecture of Collective Living

Each cohort of Projective Cities examines a common theme as the starting point for individual research agendas. The current theme is the Architecture of Collective Living. The ambition is to investigate, by comparative analysis, the different organizational, formal, programmatic, and material particularities that define the Architecture of Collective Living in series of historic and contemporary case studies. The different political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions are reflected in a number of parameters that emerge by a series of conflictual aims and ambitions. Different social groups and their interests, different conceptions of social, familial and gender relations, management and decision-making protocols, procurement models, public and private development strategies define the diagrammatic and formal relations of how we live together. All these points define a network of diagrammatic relations that emerge in a series of conflicts and their interrelated scales through which housing and the city are conceptualised: the scale of architecture, its specificity and typological analysis, the urban scale, its configuration, limits, and centralities but also the political and socio-economic realities that organise it, the national scale and the establishment of a citizenry, and the regional scale and its economic and geopolitical realities. The Architecture of Collective Living therefore opens up a discussion of how the urban can be understood through specific architecture and its design, and how its effect as an urban armature is not only of spatial importance, but equally organised by larger political and social discourses.

The spatial organization of the
Architecture of Collective Living is reflected on a series of informal and
formal relations between subjects, between spaces, between structural and
non-structural elements, between objects, and protocols of use and occupation.
Any form of collective living is characterised by this multiscalar network of
power relations that is specific and particular to each social group and
collective that lives together. A series of asymmetries and conflicts emerge
that require a resolution framework or at least protocols of conduct. What
architecture does is to set up some of these parameters, mainly the definition
of units, the relations between parts and the way groups of spaces and people
are organised.

Architectural typologies of
collective living are shaped by these distinct social diagrams but could vary
spatially and formally. Typically, collective living organises part to whole
relations that set levels of interaction between individuals: rooms, dwelling
units, horizontal and vertical circulations, spaces of collective activities
and programmes, complexes, and larger groupings. Distinct types -courtyards,
towers, linear blocks- and composite and hybrid types organize the ways and the
spaces these different interactions could occur.

Collective
living and its politically, historically, socially, economically, and
culturally specific characteristics have the capacity to challenge the
fundamental diagram of modernity: domesticity. The domestic is a spatial and
social diagram that sets very specific hierarchies and relations -gender, age,
and programmatic. Today, the single-family dwelling is challenged by the
realities of contemporary urban environments. New subjectivities have emerged:
many live outside family structures, a younger generation shares housing and
working spaces, an increasingly precarious and migrant working force requires
short term, serviced accommodation, elderly population has become more present
and active in cities across the world.

The
reality of the real estate market, the available design tools and building
methods and standards are not necessarily reflecting upon the above
transformations. Often, the challenges of new forms of collective living are
tackled as a financial problem, or an issue of density and lifestyle. However,
historically collective living and forms of living together has had the
capacity of opening up social and spatial imagination. Today, there is an array
of incredibly interesting experimentation in collective living protocols and
architectural configurations, such as new forms of cooperatives that have
proposed new types of collective living units, such as the ‘cluster apartment’.
Moreover, public administrations and private stakeholders are seeking new ideas
that would allow for an imaginative transformation of how people live in
cities, in urban and rural areas across the world.

Thus, one of the challenges arising from the Architecture of Collective Living is how architecture can respond to changing political, cultural, economic, and urban contexts and how to propose new effective design ideas and models. What is the agency of architecture? How do we develop a pedagogical model that allows for a more effective relation between academic institutions and practice?

Corporateville
Dario Marcobelli: This dissertation examines the relationship between corporate environments and leisure activities in the reorganisation of work in tech industries. Activities traditionally associated with...

The City and the Spanish Colonial Project
Claudio Nieto Rojas: Parting from the similarities among historic centres of most Latin American cities, the following enquiry: Is there an organising logic behind the...

The Kunsthalle
Ricardo Palma Prieto: The Kunsthalle, as a temporary exhibition space, is an institutional building devoid of compromise largely associated with the collecting or selling of...

Law Courts
Raül P. Avilla Royo: Power is represented by official architecture. A judicial city is a representation of the power of justice. What is at stake...

Prefectural Libraries in Postwar Japan
Lucia Alonso Aranda: Prefectural libraries in post-war Japan have greatly influenced how Japanese people understand libraries today. Their evolution can be traced clearly to a...

Sovereignty of Use: Reframing Ownership
Valerio Massaro: Posters by the New York City Housing Authority from the 1930’s New Deal, USA: The modern apartment and a transition from slum dweller to productive...

Guest Seminar: Christoph Schmidt, ifau Berlin
Spaces of Negotiation Date: 26/05/2020Time: 10:00-11:30Venue: AA Lecture Hall Microsoft Team What if architecture does not solve conflicts or tries to organize them by assignments?...

Graduate School Prize for Research
Congratulations to Alvaro Arancibia, former Projective Cities student, for winning the inaugural AA Graduate School Prize for Research for his PhD Thesis ‘The Social Re-Signification...

AAPC Guest Seminar: Charles Rice
Date: 24/01/2017 Time: 14:00 Venue: 32FFB Charles Rice joined Projective Cities for a seminar on his new book Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown...